I continue to think through the ideas of containers in dialogic work. Thanks to some conversations with a couple of colleagues I had a thought today about the three-cornered nature of the container.
Inspired by the idea of a trialectic, we can describe containers as occupying a space between three points, depending on what they are, what work they are doing and the nature of the substrate in which they sit. The thee points are Designed, Built, and Emergent. Each of these three has a particular focus. The Designed container channels intention. The Built container provides retention and the Emergent container arises from, and demands, attention.
In facilitation practice, the language tends towards designed and built containers. We talk about holding space, we talk about the boundaries, the physical space, the beautiful question, the method. The role of the facilitator is often defined as a person that designs and holds containers.
Complexity however bids us to pay attention to what is happening. When humans meet, containers emerge, almost instantly. Our attention is directed and held, not with the help of a facilitator, but because the constraints of the situation shape what happens. Some constraints precede the encounter, like physical space, organizational history, culture, and power relations. Others emerge through interaction itself. Some are brought by the designer into the room. Together they constitute the container.
Every actual container is some combination of design, building and emergence. The space between these points is what matters, Asking where a container sits within the triangle tells us what work is being done by intention, what work has been stabilized in material, legal, or social structures, and what work must remain open to emergence.
Different types of containers need to do different work. A storage locker is a kind of built container whose work is only the retention of a space that can be filled. There is very little intention paid to the design of a storage locker, and once one is built, it doesn’t need to be designed again. Not much emerges within it. That’s a feature.
An emergent container is one that arises, for example, when two friends meet on the street. In the moment of encounter, a boundary begins to form and an attractor holds the attention of the interaction. When two friends are actively engaged in a conversation on the street there is stuff going on that an “outsider” would struggle to understand. What is at the centre of their shared attention might not be shared by others. You can feel how this little social space is carved out of the rest of the environment. A conversation between friends relies on attention to proceed, and both bring attention to the moment. No designer. No robust structure that must be held.
A designed container is something like a meeting method. When I am using Open Space for example, I am bringing a deliberate intention to the group. “We should meet this way. The conversations should flow like this. The outcomes can be harvested here.” This can be both helpful and extremely perilous.
When design makes contact with reality is the critical moment. Design is only the beginning. Once people begin interacting, the container inevitably shifts toward emergence. Good facilitation is less about preserving the design than noticing where the design is making contact with reality. If the design is held too tightly, the designer is privileged in the space and the group loses possibilities for true emergence. If the design proceeds from the use of constraints to shape interactions, that can be extremely helpful. If the work is complex, bringing attention to bear into the work is critical. The facilitator role shifts from being the process host to holding attention to what is emerging. Not to name it, or to synthesize, but to inform the next move of shifting constraints, including by enlisting the group in that work: “Should we take a break? Do we need more time? Is this the right question? What’s happening now?”
Design that contacts reality in a built container is one in which intention informs the retention. This is how architecture works. It’s about the deployment of pattern languages (in the Alexandrian sense) to the built environment. A living built environment begins with intention that translates into retention provided by stable structures in the built environment. It alos provides affordances for the attention of the users of space to learn and shape the space afterwards. Think of a community garden, or over longer scales, the built environments of towns and villages that shift and change over the years. Stuart Brand wrote about this in “How Buildings Learn.”
I’m exploring the idea that dialogic containers are spaces and moments (physical and non-physical) in which humans make meaning. Dialogic containers are not things facilitators create or hold. They are patterns of constraint within which meaning-making becomes possible. Good facilitation lies not in holding the container but in learning when to design with constraints, when to rely on built ones, and when to let emergent constraints lead.
The photo for this post was taken on Whyte Avenue in Edmonton last June when the Edmonton Oilers were in the Stanley Cup Finals. Everything in this photo can be mapped in the triangle above.
Questions are the central preoccupation of my work. I ask them of clients, we ask them together, we ask questions about questions to be sure that we are asking good questions and when we aren’t we ask questions about what would be the better questions. In uncertain situations, the quality of our inquiry often matters far more than the quality of our answers.
So much of my work deals with supporting groups and organizations as they explore uncertainty, ambiguity, and unknowable futures, that answers are usually less helpful than good questions. The question often then becomes, what makes a question good?
For years in the Art of Hosting I have avoided teaching about good or powerful questions. My reticence to do so was based in the idea that knowing what a good question is is so context dependant that I couldn’t possibly tell you unless we had a context to work with. I think the role of hosts is not arrive bringing the powerful question but to arrive bringing the attention needed to notice the questions that are alive in a field of work.
There are however a few useful pieces of scaffolding that might hep a person get started in thinking about questions. At a recent Art of Hosting, my colleagues taught a short introduction to powerful questions using a kind of hierarchy of questions that is contained in Vogt, Brown and Isaacs’ “The Art of Powerful Questions.” It looks like this:
from Vogt, Brown and Isaacs’ “The Art of Powerful Questions.”
This hierarchy started me thinking about this post. In re-reading the Art of Powerful Questions, I could see that there were two distinct practices discussed there. One was the practice of designing questions. The other is the practice of discovering questions. As one source in the publication says:
“Discovering strategic questions is like panning for gold. You have to care about finding it, you have to be curious, and you have to create an anticipation of discovering gold, even though none of us may know ahead of time where we’ll find it. You head toward the general territory where you think the gold may be located, with your best tools, your experience, and your instincts. And then you begin a disciplined search for the gold.”
THAT is what interests me.
A question does not have power on its own
Let’s stick with the first practice for a moment: designing questions. Every facilitator at some point has kept a journal of good questions. When you do you start to notice that it is impossible to speak with certainty about what makes a question powerful. What this hierarchy does is to put various English interrogatives into a kind of sequence, not of powerfulness actually, but ostensibly of openness. Yes/no questions are clearly more limiting than Why or What questions. But I don’t know if they are more powerful. One of the most powerful questions I ever asked was “Do you want to get married?” It was by far the most consequential question of my life and it really came down to yes or no. Likewise, one of the most debilitating questions I was ever asked was from a teacher who was frustrated by what I later learned was a classic presentation of ADHD who asked twelve year old me “Why do you disappoint me?” If a yes/no question has two answers, that Why question had zero. And perhaps it was powerful, but it wasn’t generative. It was, unknowingly to the frustrated teacher, cruel.
The other thing to note about how questions are skewed by context is that the questions above were put in a relational context. “What do you think you’re doing?” is not really a question, and it carries the overtones of disapproval from a person in power. Questions like that are carried in a medium of relationship that render the hierarchy of powerfulness almost useless.
There are lots of different kinds of questions. There are closed questions and open questions. There are questions that we have answers to, questions that lead us in a certain direction, and questions that invite us to keep uncertainty and openness and exploration alive. There are questions about the past, the present and the future. Lineal, circular, strategic and reflexive questions. Directed and undirected questions, and so on. I spend a lot of time helping people to NOT ask yes/no questions like “Did you receive good support for this problem? If no, please explain.” It’s better to ask “What kind of support did you receive?” and have people share a story and tell you themselves if it was good service or not. This is the basis of work with Participatory Narrative Inquiry
The Art of Powerful Questions as a document really came out of a conversation between a number of people involved in the World Cafe community as they were thinking about questions, and I recommend it as a good starting point. The World Cafe community continues to explore this question about questions.
After working with questions for many years and especially increasingly working in complex and emergent contexts, I think my practice has led me away from designing good questions to trying to discover them. As a leader in places where I have led sometimes framing the right question is the right thing to do, but it is about adopting the stance of inquiry that is ultimately more important that having a perfect, powerful question.
Questions are proposals embedded in contexts
Questions are embedded in contexts. The combination of the question and the context creates a kind of proposal for action. What has intrinsic power in a complex system is the questioner. As a facilitator, if I ask a question of a group, it collapses the field of possibilities in the room because I have made an implicit proposal about what is important right now. Even if I have spent time to craft that question with a bunch of people from the organization or group I am working with, the act of me asking that question is where the power lies. So, while it is important to pay attention to assumptions embedded in questions, it is also important to be aware of the proposals embedded in questions.
A question like “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” is a beautiful question. But if I ask it in a group I am making as assumption that the people I am asking it about have similar thoughts about their lives as Mary Oliver does. I am also making a proposal, as Mary Oliver does, that I’m possibly not doing enough in my life to bring more attention or purpose or meaning. Or I may be assuming that folks, as she says
know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Not everybody has that kind of idleness at hand to be able to reflect on whether contemplating a grasshopper was a good use of time. Asking folks that question devoid of the context of their lives, the urgency of a situation, or the consent to be in that conversation is a hell of a proposal. Imagine asking a seasonal farm worker that question. Or the Dalai Lama.
Beautiful questions are not necessarily inviting questions
Mary Oliver’s question is beautiful. It stands on its own because it is a poetic statement. I’m not sure it actually wants an answer. It seems to invite a turning, a metanoia, a repentance. If it were offered in a therapeutic context, it might directly imply that I’m not doing the RIGHT thing with my one will and precious life. The question therefore intimidates me and subjugates me to the author’s intention. When that intention is hidden, I feel manipulated.
I do see this often in questions that come my way like “What would be possible if we trusted each other more?” That is a question that immediately drives me to thinking about its opposite. In my world, even as a person who tends to trust more than I should, there are definitely people I should be trusting less. The idea that MORE trust leads to more possibility contains an embedded assumption, an implicit proposal and a predetermined pathway of inquiry. It avoids the first principle of good complexity work and lets the framework determine the data and not the other way around. There is no new meaning to be made from a question like that, really. The conversation is likely to be abstract and opinionated at best. And might be a naive casting about in an unknown future at worst.
That’s not to say that we can’t learn from questions like that.
If we really wanted to examine trust I might start with having people tell stories about trust to each other. How trust operates in different contexts matters, and so if the exploration is not be useful, the stories have to be relevant to the context either because they are directly related to the context or they become connected to the context through reflection and collective sense-making. Nevertheless, it’s no good that assuming that MORE trust leads to MORE possibility if there is a chance that trusting some people less in order to opens up the possibilities for a field.
Good questions can be answered by everyone, and get the facilitator out of the centre.
Not all conversations are the same, but a lot of my work deals with looking at what’s happening and exploring change. This implies a trajectory to the questions, from the present state towards a direction of travel that we might discover together. My favourite questions for this, and still the ones I use as a basic template for work are Terry Borton’s reflective questions: “What? So what? Now what?” These are so simple, and yet they hold us, as facilitators, at a distance from the group’s work, which is a good thing. They ask of us to become hosts that works with the constraints of the system that shape actions, rather than the attractors that collapse what’s possible into a single, deep, valley of channeled conversation.
As basic source code these questions are helpful. Almost every change or planning process I work with starts with “What?” There is nothing better at getting directly to the urgency of a situation than by asking what the hell is going on and then shaping the constraints of the situation such that everyone can contribute to that conversation. There is not one answer. There is a survey of the field and the perspectives in the room that gives us enough information with which to act, because in complex situations that is what we need.
The “So What?” question invites the group to look at what they have said is the “What” and make sense of it. What does this mean for us? This is the area of exploration, negotiation, discussion, perspective sharing, learning. From this sense-making comes the turn to trying things out. “Now What?” is about the actions we might to take to address a problem, explore and option or move this into a new cycle of inquiry, Glenda Eoyang calls her version of this loop “Adaptive Action.”
There is a similar construction in the Technology of Participation body of work known as ORID, which helps people in inquiry look at Objective questions, Reflective questions, Interpretive questions and Decisional questions.
Again, these methods imply a directionality to an intervention, but as long as that intention is clear and transparent and lands a proposal for action, I think the direction is ethical. If the group refuses the proposal, then the question becomes “What do we do now?” I’ve had a few cases of these in my life and they are good lessons in humility and excellent examples of watching a group activate its collective capability to frame its own questions and inquiries.
The most consequential questions are often the ones the group recognize as their own
So this brings me around to the point. A question shapes the field of attention. In complexity terms it becomes a constraint and makes some things easier to notice and others easier to ignore. It channels attention and participation. If it is understood as a probe to that system, to see what else might emerge, it can be useful. If it is held tightly as The Thing We Are Here To Talk About then it becomes non-consensual and it suppresses the emergence that is needed for a group to discover and rely on its own capability and distributed knowledge. For complex and uncertain work, including planning, change, and culture, the questions are already in the field. They are the ones that everyone is asking in their minds. Not “What would be possible in five years if we became a more welcoming community?” but rather “What are we going to do about these damn tourists?” (That might be from a real situation. 😉 )
But what about my one wild and precious question?
So the most powerful question is not the one that the facilitator brings. In fact my advice would almost always be to start with “What’s happening?” and go from there. Bring attention, not intention. When a group develops enough shared attention sometimes the powerful question emerges there and it seems obvious. We need to not go looking for beautiful constructions, poetic and inspiring language, or even hierarchies of importance. We need to pay attention to the conversations that are already happening, the questions that people are asking themselves, the relational fields in which those questions are being asked and the larger context of need and purpose that forms the proposal for the intervention.
Practitioners intervene. That’s what we do. Letting go of the need to bring the powerful question helps us to do it better because it turns a predetermined intervention into a collectively help proposal for action, one that can be explored, contested, rejected, accepted, or changed. Start simple and be transparent. Start with a question that everyone can answer, one like “Can you share an experience of… What happened?” Take the answers to those questions and give them to people and ask them what they make of them. Then let the next question emerge from what the group has made visible together.
I’m still delightfully jet lagged from the France trip meaning, early nights and early mornings, which suits me fine. It gives me time to read and reflect and to walk, this morning taking time to make a detailed eBird list of the species around me (about 25 this morning, many new flycatchers on the scene), and sit by the sea and catch up with neighbours and their dogs.
I was walking a bit this morning with Augusto Cugnotti’s post in my mind, “The Container is Borrowed” in which he reflects on a mammoth essay by Mark Downham called “The Geometry of the Vanishing Container.”
Downham’s essay imagines a kind of conservation between Harrison Owen and Patricia Shaw, who is a much more interesting person to read. I have not read much of Shaw’s work, to my shame. She was a collaborator with Ralph Stacy and her book on Changing Conversations in Organizations is an important work, and I’ve made a note to take Augusto’s advice and read it.
At any rate, the Coles Notes version here is that I’m looking at this through my own interest in what a “container” is. Increasingly I think that the way I think about dialogic containers are not really captured in the way folks talk use the word. Harrison’s work, captured in Downham’s essay is that the container (especially the physical container) is prepared as a way to trying to create the conditions for emergence. That was his abiding interest and I think Downham names the liturgical and spiritual elements of that in a way I haven’t really seen others capture. When I’m setting up a room, I sometimes feel like a bower bird, and I won’t pretend that liturgy and ceremony is far from my mind. I get it.
It seems that Shaw’s work is primarily concerned with the idea that a consultant or a host or a facilitator can never really be outside of the field in which they are intervening. This seems elemental to me and I’ve made a point of saying that the Participation aspect of the Four Fold Practice of the Art of Hosting is very much about this. You are a part of the field, as is the container and everything else.
Augusto is naming some of these ideas here and it makes me think about why both actual appeal to me.
I see containers as constraint regimes. They are structures that are catalyzed and emerge from constraints that create boundaries and affordances for meaning and action. They are emergent. They are a part of the field, and when we step into a field (a la Shaw) we create a constraint regime just through our presence. Harrison’s approach is that we create physical space and get out of the way of what happens next. But it seems obvious to me that what happens next is not devoid of power, conflict or all the avoidances and limitations that are rooted in the field as well. It is naive to use Open Space (our any other methods) and believe that somehow everyone has left history and identity at the door, including the host. They have not.
Somehow I might define my work as catalyzing action that moves in a “more like this, less like that” direction by working with constraints to change interactions. All change work is about changing constraints, and finding the ones that are most influential in a given context is what complexity work is about. It is not the work of the facilitator to do that. Complex facilitation is about changing interactions not about changing people. A facilitator is not neutral in this context but is in fact a deeply influential participant.
I’m not defending Harrison’s work per se, but learning Open Space taught me about the essential work of managing process and not getting involved in content. It was the first big move for me away from traditional “get involved in the content” facilitation. Shaw’s work – as I understand it from the papers I’ve read – is about acknowledging that there is no “outside.” This was clear to me as a person who had spent my whole career working in communities and organizations. These ideas flow from a number of streams. Lewin helpfully names fields. Snowden and Juarrero name constraints. Pualani Kanakaole names the importance of the deep layers of context that do the real work of hosting. Snowden and Kurtz name the importance of narrative. Isaacs names the container. All of it conspires and moves together to put a question to the practitioner:
“What are you doing?”
When I enter a field to make change now it is not without attention to the landscape of meaning and affordances that exist. I use narrative capture to do that so that the field itself can talk about its experiences, make sense of them, decide what to do. There is a container for this work, and it is lifted intentionally and deliberately and gently from the field, like pinching a bit of cloth on a table to form a little wrinkle. It is not the One Meeting That Rules Them All. Change work requires staying in intimate contact with the field, the larger context. When the dialogic container loses contact with the field, whatever happens there will fail to make the change. It becomes its own thing. Fun maybe, or frustrating, or a kind of utopia. But you will quickly hear people talk about returning to “the real world.” Understanding the current topography of change and resistance and make that visible with minimal intervention is critical. Keeping the work in contact with the field but intervening in smaller ways more often gives a better chance that affordances will be found for promising action. If you aren’t making change in the “real world,” change isn’t being made.
Containers exist because constraints exist. There is a connection. There is a flow. There is an inside and outside, there is an attractor. Even in the most subtle forms, these precipitate differences that become meaningful. What is happening inside this coffee shop is defined by who is on what side of the counter, which languages are being spoken, what the layout of tables and benches do. Who knows whom. The woman who made my espresso was once a kid on a team I coached. When she appears at her job at the community centre, I don’t order coffee from her. We both own shares in the same soccer team, one for which she also once played. The container emerges, is “borrowed” as Augusto says, from the field.
We cannot pretend otherwise. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t intervene to make change. It means we should be aware of our intervention and the role we play especially if we show up to the field with power and influence. And if we are making change, that work needs to be as deeply embedded in the field itself and not in the briefcases of consultants or the magic spells of method user guides. It’s about practice. I’m a practitioner.
Harrison’s most influential teaching on my life was not Open Space, actually. It was his slogan “Don’t trust the process, trust the people.” Follow that to its deepest implications and one might arrive at the kinds of questions about epistemic justice, colonization, domination, change-making, and democracy that matter. Those implications are ever-present in my work. I have no answers, but the question “What am I doing?” is a dear companion on the journey.
Dave Snowden concluded his six-part series on the Channel and the Estuary this week. He used gangster movies and TV Series to illustrate the different kinds of contexts in which people are sense-making. The series contrasted the categorical ambiguity and gradients represented by the ecology of a tidal estuary with the managed and ordered passageway through uncertainty represented by the marked channel. The metaphors are meaningful for coastal people, and anyone who has had to navigate these kinds of marine ecosystems. The point is that navigating in the estuary and in the channel requires different approaches to sense-making.
The whole series deserves to be read and thought through, as it is an important declaration of what “complexity thinking” really is and what it requires from the complexity practitioner. It is also a warning against the way in which we receive the world in a pre-channeled, dredged state, made easier for us; “facilitated” one might say, especially by the digitization of our experience, which has dredged and channelled the world and offered us pre-designed categories of experience.
Dave’s series contains an embedded tribute to those whose lot in life requires them to practice estuarine thinking in a world of pre-cut channels. It recognizes the loneliness that such people sometimes experience and the separateness they often feel. It is also a call to action for an approach to organizational life that treats complexity as a context in which we are required to deploy “estuarine thinking.” These are lost capacities – exiled capacities, if you like – and we lose something essential if they disappear.
I have been wrestling with this series from the perspective of a person who hosts conversations in organizations and communities. Dave’s work has deeply shaped the way I view and practice facilitation over the past 15 years or so. It has left me in a liminal space of practice. I try to locate myself adjacent to those in the ‘facilitation’ world, those who are dialogic practitioners, and folks who are exploring the implications that complexity has for their practice. I say adjacent because I am aware that although I use the language of facilitation, dialogue, and hosting, I find that much of the practice in these fields fails to confront the complexity of human groups and systems. We all have work to do to build our practice around Dave’s invitation, not just in these posts but in his work in general as it relates to complex facilitation.
The thing about complexity is that once you see it you can’t unsee it, and Dave’s refection on the gangsters and business mavens from Guinness, Peaky Blinders and The Godfather had me noticing similar patterns in the stories I was encountering. Last weekend, we attended a screening of the 1961 version of the film West Side Story, which is unbelievably contemporary in many ways, not the least of which is that it explores what happens when people are born into a world of tight constraints not of their making. I have never seen the film or the musical, so this was all new to me. There is A LOT I can say about this film, and perhaps it deserves a whole other post to explore some of the themes, but one scene stood out to me in particular, and I think anyone who engages in facilitation (or community development or consulting or organizing) might find it beneficial to watch this and reflect.
The two gangs, the Jets and the Sharks, are locked in a struggle against each other, divided by ethnicity, neighbourhood, history, and class. Tony, the former leader of the Jets, falls in love with Maria, the younger sister of the Sharks’ leader. Their love crosses the boundaries of gangs, race, history, and tradition. Both gangs sing about the constraints of their worlds: childhood trauma, exclusion, racism, homesickness, loyalty, and the struggle to belong. At a critical point in the film, both gangs agree to meet at a dance in what they consider ‘neutral’ territory.
The dance is run by a social worker called Glad Hand, played beautiful by John Astin. Glad Hand, armed with his clipboard and his whistle, has some activities planned for the dance, and he naively tries to mix up the crowd of teenagers, probably so that they might have a different kind of experience of getting to know one another. His design for the evening is almost totally ignorant of the contexts that make it impossible for this dance to have any kind of success. It is a well-intentioned effort that goes terribly wrong. You can see the painfully earnest effort on Astin’s face, convinced that he is bringing a hopeful and helpful evening to this group of poor immigrant youth.
In the key scene, Glad Hand organizes the teenagers into a circle dance. the idea is that the girls walk one way and the boys walk the other and when he blows the whistle you have to dance with who ever you are standing in front of. He says “form a circle. Boys will be on the outside, girls will be on the inside.” Action, one of the Jets who has the best, most cynical quips in the films asks “And where will you be?” Glad Hand chuckles nervously with an awkward smile and ignores the question.
It takes a few moments for anyone to move into the circle. There is no trust between the teens and Glad Hand and everybody is HYPER aware of the dynamics in the room which Glad Hand has just gleefully ignored in favour of his plans and his clipboard. He has tried to create “safe” space and the gangs understand this as “neutral” space, which is a very different thing. “Neutral” requires that you keep your guard up and restrain your instincts. While Glad Hand is committed to civility, the gangs are actually committed to an uneasy peace in a social field that is filled with tension.
As the circle dance begins Glad Hand is clearly waiting for his chance to impose a predetermined outcome, where the Sharks girls will end up with the Jets boys and vice versa. It’s transparent and manipulative. The kids in the dance are looking anxiously around themselves, scanning the room and knowing exactly where they are in every moment. Glad Hand blows his whistle when the circles are lined up perfectly for his agenda. Immediately everyone catches on to what is happening. They stop, look around and break the exercise and go back into their couples and groups, and the dance disintegrates into a ritualized gang war, with the two sides doing their own thing more divided than ever. As the circle breaks down you can see the police officer running to Glad Hand and clearly reprimanding him for the situation he has created. This is the last we see of the social worker.
This is deeply familiar to me, and perhaps you too. For many of us the facilitation journey starts with tools and methods. A devotion to these creates a situation in which the context and pre-existing constraints are pushed into the background. When a group rebels against what I am doing. my experience has been that it is almost always the result of my own ignorance to what is happening in the group. These are hard lessons to learn, but important. It’s why I wrote the series on theory, to recognize that the dialogic containers in which we are working are embedded in multiple constraint regimes and landscapes of context which exert a more powerful influence on the present moment than a facilitated method.
Dave’s recent series pushes us to understand the capacity needed not only to enter into the ambiguous and uncertain space of complex situations, but to navigate once we are there. It calls me to a practice of constant self-reflection, knowing that in any situations it is impossible to map the next step, and recognizing that the channel markers I encounter are often the ones I have put down before, to protect myself, to avoid the messiness I can’t handle, to steer the group into a place where I am most comfortable or hopeful. Channels are not bad in and of themselves. But one cannot lose sight of the estuary in which the channel is dredged.
Relentless self-awareness is critical to leading in the estuary. Being aware of where we are in relation to what is happening, and knowing how to respond to the steadily changing context is the capacity. It is not often what people are contracting you for; so often the client wants certainty and structure and guidance. What is needed in complexity instead is a kind of learning scaffolding that for developing the capacity that people have for being in the estuary. Dredging a channel does not mean that we are no longer navigating in the salt marsh. On the contrary, it may well rob us of the ability to be able to do so.
In this first instalment of this series I moved the focus of facilitation practice from tools to context. In this instalment I want to explore what it means to “hold space” and why this is only part of the work in the dialogic container.
Dialogic facilitation is concerned with meaning making events in a discrete space and time. This space and time is both physical and social, and it is what I call a “dialogic container.” These are places in which people come together to engage in meaning making and action. The dialogic container is context for the work that happens and the container gives rise to meaning between participants in the dialogue. Within the container, participants engage and interact and make meaning together. The dialogic container is the scale at which participants can take immediate action. It is intimate and vibrant. Meetings and gatherings host agency, and for this reason I think we often think of them as important for making larger changes.
Many people have talked about the role of the facilitator as “holding space” and I even wrote a book on that practice. “Holding space” is a vague term that has many definitions. It doesn’t even really convey the practice well. Nothing is actually “held” and “space” can mean a bunch of different things. The term describes a practice that is ineffable and intangible and yet important to good dialogue.
Despite its importance, I don’t want to talk about “holding space” as a practice. You can go and read my “Tao of Holding Space” for more reflections on the practice. Instead I want to point to the space that is being held: the dialogic container.
This is the first and closest level of context inside of which dialogue happens. In large group meetings, other containers form in small groups. In the large group facilitation work I do, it isn’t possible for one person to hold the variety of spaces that appear and emerge in complex dialogue facilitation. Instead the role of the facilitator is to shape the constraints of that space to enable maximum agency and self-organization of the participants and to encourage the emergence of desired insights, outcomes and actions.
Good facilitators make choices about how constraints are used to shape interactions between people. Once these constraints are put in place the role of the facilitator is to be, in Harrison Owen’s words, “totally present and completely invisible” until such a time as the group process needs to change. Facilitators have a great deal of power in these contexts. We can cut off a conversation, make a subtle adjustment in a space to separate people or encourage or prevent different things from happening. Conscious facilitation requires us to be hyper aware of our impact in dialogic spaces and to be clear and honest with our influence on the proceedings.
Take a moment to reflect on the meetings and conversations you are a part of. Think about how the setting influences what happens, how the physical space constrains or invites different possibilities. Think about how choices that are made in that meeting influence the conversations that are being had and what happens.
On reflection it should be very clear that this context is extremely influential in the process of dialogue. No two conversations are ever alike. No two conversations will render the same outcomes. No two people will experience the conversation in the same way.
In World Cafe conversations we see this happen all the time. Because that process is structured around small groups which change every 20-30 minutes, participants quickly get the sense that just changing two or three people in a conversation or taking up another spot in the room can significantly change the nature and quality of the conversation. That can be frustrating if a conversation is going really well, because a “sticky container” can form, one which is difficult to break. In other cases, having the conversation end can be a relief as people look to get out of an unpleasant discussion or an uncomfortable dynamic.
Dialogic containers form around constraints, including attractors that draw people’s attention together. A powerful and necessary question is an attractor. A shared purpose can be a strong attractor. Attractors bring coherence. In a conversation about the future of a social services agency, it doesn’t make sense to talk about manufacturing cars because the topic is incoherent in the context of the conversation.
Power is another form of attractor. When powerful people are in the room it changes the nature of the conversation. We say of circle for example, that the shape does not equalize power relationships. It simply gives people equal access to the centre of the room, and figuratively it symbolizes that participants are offered equal access to the dialogue topic. But power still exists, and it is endlessly fascinating in a highly democratic process to watch a group organize itself around the twin attractors of shared purpose and powerful people.
At some point in a dialogue session the facilitator is the most powerful person in the room. To the extent that there is trust between the group and the facilitator, participants will consent to the proposed process of dialogue. In situations of extremely low trust, it is possible that a meeting will simply fail to get off the ground. Sometimes the facilitator becomes the common enemy, and the group rebels against any shaping of its time together.
But in situations of high trust, a group may consent to a process because they are clear that it helps them to address as persistent need amongst them. As a facilitator I spend massive amounts of time with my clients in design and co-creation of processes – especially novel processes – so that we don’t show up on the day and need to overcome suspicion and anxiety before getting started. If I am to occupy to most important space in the room, even for a short time, I must be able to have trust to be there.
In this respect there are no neutral facilitators. The role is far from neutral; rather it is influential. One may be agnostic or even ignorant about the content of the gathering (and I’ve run meetings in languages I don’t speak, like Irish, Turkish, Estonian, French, and multilingual meetings too, which shows that connection to content is not essential) but you are not neutral in terms of influencing the group’s process. The choices that the facilitator makes, especially in a container in which one has a lot of trust, will shape the process significantly and influence the nature of relationships between people going forward.
So the dialogic container is important, because in any process, it is the space of immediate encounter and immediate agency. People will make meaning and act together. They will bring story and expectations and history into the room with them and they will form relationships (or break them) which will influence outcomes as much or moreso than the decisions made in the meeting.
While meetings are important, my experience is that the most significant results of most meetings is the relational field that is built by being together. Many clients expect high stakes meetings to produce miracles – fundamental transformations in insight or decision making that changes everything. In my experience, a single meeting is inadequate for this. However, dialogic containers can be powerful places where people learn new things, change views, form new relationships, or discover new insights. That is their promise.
Still, it is common to hear from participants in a container “this is all good, but how will it be when we return to the ‘real world’.” This is a valid question and it has to do with the next post in this series, on the contexts in which dialogic work is embedded. Dialogic containers are necessary for meaningful action, but rarely sufficient for sustained change. They are embedded in larger contexts that shape what happens once the meeting ends.
For now though the point of this post is to establish the importance of container and context in which dialogic works happens. The nature of the container, in all of its complexity, plays a significant role in the tangible and intangible outcomes of dialogue work. Once we see that, we can begin to see that the work of dialogue facilitation is both about “what happens in the room” as well as what happens in the context in which that room is situated.